Data Black Holes Versus Data Clouds: Notes from the Extradata Era
24. September 2025 Academy of Fine Arts ALUO, University of Ljubljana
6th International Conference of Theoretical Studies
Lecture von Eszter Polony, Universitätsassistentin / Abteilung Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttheorie.
In 2005, two concerned civilians filed a lawsuit to shut down Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest scientific experiment designed to investigate quantum phenomena such as supersymmetry, extra dimensions and dark matter. Their complaint was that, running at roughly 7 million times the energy per year than a single high-energy beam that circulated within it, the LHC operated at energy levels that risked opening a black hole that would swallow the planet. The case was dismissed in 2008 on the basis of technical terms, rather than scientific ones. Among the reasons given were absurdities to which the lawsuit gave rise within legal procedure, including finding a witness, and producing a cost-benefit analysis in which the projected scientific outcomes of the experiment were measured against the future of the entire planet and “life as we know it.” Often referred to colloquially as the “doomsday lawsuit,” this case testifies to a newfound difficulty in adapting technical discourse to the planetary framework of the Anthropocene (Crutzen&Stoermer) within which the human scientific and cultural imagination had been operating in the last century. This paper considers the fascination with black holes across technical, scientific and artistic types of imagination as a symptom of cognitive overwhelm happening at the level of data management (B.Bratton, T.Paglen, Y.Hui). At a time when the artificially intelligent agents collecting, storing, mining, and processing are starting to exceed planetary resources, hungry black holes and other extraplanetary phenomena have taken over from earthbound “clouds” (JD Peters) as metaphors of technical and conceptual expansion. The paper examines the off-world frontiers of data collection of what it calls the “Extradata Era” in contemporary photography and theoretical physics.
